Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. The semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductor layers of materials over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allows more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that take up less area than the packages of the past, in some applications.
Singulation may occur at different stages of semiconductor manufacturing. A semiconductor substrate may be singulated into individual dies after the semiconductor devices and interconnects are formed. The individual dies may be packaged separately to another semiconductor substrate that is then singulated again into a packaged chip. In some semiconductor manufacturing processes commonly referred to as wafer-level packaging, a semiconductor substrate having all of the semiconductor devices and interconnects is first packaged to another substrate before singulation. Thus, singulation may occur one or more times during semiconductor manufacturing.
Although numerous improvements to the methods of performing a sawing process have been invented, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a solution to improve the sawing process so as to increase the production yield of the semiconductor wafers.